Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-24-Speech-2-252"
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"en.20070424.46.2-252"2
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".
Madam President, Mrs Roth, Mr Barrot, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the European Union is regaining some of the trust of European citizens, partly because it is following a consumer protection strategy with a certain consistency – or at least I hope it is doing so. In our case this means a strategy to protect travellers, namely consumers when they are travelling.
This has already happened in the sphere of civil aviation and I hope that it is also happening in the rail sphere. I believe that the regulation on which I have had the honour to be rapporteur should also be read in this sense. This is a regulation that makes some small but significant steps in harmonising the protection of passengers and their baggage. To that end, it seeks to make compulsory, or at least to extend, the application of the Athens Convention, which already governs this field with regard to the definition of rules and liability, as well as to require anyone that transports people to have compulsory insurance, identifying means of immediate redress in the event of accidents, with prompt and satisfactory compensation.
The regulation under consideration takes a few steps that go further than the Athens Convention. I do not intend to dwell upon technical aspects at the moment, but I would like to stress that the scope of these protective measures is being extended. The Athens Convention was only able to deal with international transport. The Baltic and the Mediterranean are, however, basins in which much of the transport is internal transport. In addition, following the enlargement of the Union to encompass Bulgaria and Romania, the major internal European navigation routes must now be treated in the same way. For this reason I have endorsed and continue to endorse – and I hope that Parliament, the Council and the Commission will do likewise – the extension of passenger protection to internal transport too.
With regard to internal transport, the small amount of resistance that did exist has practically disappeared following the latest accident, which happened in early April with the
near the island of Santorini. It is unimaginable that the two persons who disappeared should not be protected, while they would have been if they had disappeared in the Atlantic or Indian Oceans. It is clear that discrimination of this kind is unacceptable. Since it seems to me that there are still some remaining difficulties in accepting the extension of protection to internal waters, I hope that we will not have to wait for an accident on some river before making the decision to extend cover to internal transport too. It seems clear to me that we cannot conceive of protecting people travelling on a large river vessel in a different way from those travelling on a small ship on the sea, whom we do protect.
In addition, if we consider the technical point that some ships now make both river and maritime voyages, it would be quite ridiculous for them to be covered only at sea and not when sailing on rivers. I therefore believe that the regulation that we are adopting goes doubly in the right direction, in the sense that it also takes into account this aspect of maritime security, thus putting those who travel by sea more at ease.
I would like to point out that persons with reduced mobility are protected more appropriately, that anyone who has an accident is immediately compensated, that there are also limits to carriers’ liability, because if they adopt the Athens Convention they do not have unlimited liability, and so forth. There are thousands of other aspects, but the basic point is the fact that we are treating all European citizens who are travelling in the same way, whether they are travelling internationally or nationally, on internal waterways or outside European waters, when they are covered by European provisions.
In view of this, I hope that we can go forward in this direction, and can thus gain the attention and recognition of European citizens. They can look at this section of the Union’s activities, which continues to provide solutions that are useful and important to all citizens and that can also, in some way, make up for other deficiencies in the more general debate that we are having at the moment."@en1
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